It is generally believed that crude oil reserves, at least those extractable using present economically practical means, will continue to decrease while, at the same time, due to factors such as population changes and demographic shifts, the number of people requiring, or desiring personal vehicular transportation will continue to increase. Electric drive vehicles (EVs), meaning vehicles propelled by an electric motor and having local means (e.g., storage batteries) for storing the electricity to power the electric motor, have been long known as a promising technological means to adapt to the first of these trends and, at the same time, accommodate the second trend. However, for nearly as long as EVs have been seen as a potential solution to these trends of a decline in crude oil and increase in drivers, it has been known that difficulties must be overcome for EVs to be an actual replacement for fossil fuel vehicles.
One example of such difficulties is that the marketplace mechanism for conveying the electric power product of the electric power entities to the EV owners is not yet defined, much less established. Lack of this marketplace mechanism can prevent optimal matching of available electric power supply to EV electric power demand need. The marketplace for conveying fossil fuel from supplier to purchaser is, in contrast, very well established. However, these marketplace mechanisms for fossil fuel have evolved and are optimized for moving product, one-way only, from a very small number of sources to a very large number of end customers. Such mechanisms cannot accommodate the dynamic, multiple-supplier, potentially two-way market of EV electric power.
There are existing market mechanisms for certain kinds of electric power, such as for homeowners to select a power generating entity among multiple of such competing entities. However, these market mechanisms are based on slow-moving supply and demand, with a small number of large scale supplier, and can embody little more than distributing to homeowners a plurality plans formulated by each of a small number of competing electric power generating entities. The homeowner selects among these competing plans, which can lock the homeowner into the plan (e.g., for one year), and contractually obligate the electric power supplier to provide the power at the promised price for that duration. This and other known mechanisms, however, do not provide for real-time communication and processing of supply information, or demand information among participants in an EV charging service market having, for example, hundreds of thousands of EVs in a constantly changing state of operation, and state of demand, and a large number of electric power providers. Such known mechanisms can therefore be incapable of ensuring the market drives the price point for transacting electric power among EVs and electric power providers to an accurate supply-demand curve between well-informed parties.